THE RUSSIANS ARE IN THE BALKANS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 275, 29 September 1944, Page 10

THE RUSSIANS ARE IN THE BALKANS

The Background of the Soviet’s Whirleind Penetration=

Discussed for "The Listener"

by

A.M.

R.

(Photographs by Marjorie Richards)

ROPEAN wars have been threatened and one actually fought to keep Russia out of the Balkans. But now that it has at last occurred it gets bare mention in the news. We are so interested in another advance into Germany, or another island hop in the Pacific, that we barely notice how: Russian troops have entered every Balkan country. However, who occupies and reorganises the Balkans is just as important as how Germany itself is occupied and reorganised. Europe for a whole century has been an unstable-and therefore potentially explosive-mixture of states and cultures largely because its Eastern, and particularly South-eastern, regions have been hungry, divided, discontented, and distracted, exploited as political pawns. Unless very quickly we can make them united, independent, and prosperous there will be nothing in Europe to counterbalance the strong Germany which concern for the _ continent’s economic welfare may cause the peacemakers to create, or alternatively, nothing to absorb the unrest and disequilibrium that would radiate from a weak Germany. But are the Balkans themselves willing to be united and enriched? And when we shortly awake to the realisation that Russia has opened a Second Front on her own account and swept up a quarter of the continent with her left hand, will traditional fears and jealousies revive and prevent a realistic settlement? Nobody Knows the Balkans Nobody knows the Balkans. Out ofevery thousand New Zealanders visiting Europe I doubt if one goes there. Even the Europeans themselves-those in the west and centre-talk of this big peninsula of theirs as if it were a strange Asiatic or other distant country of incomprehensible feuds. Indeed it is to the misunderstanding of Balkan conditions

by the Western statesmen who have been trying to settle its affairs for a century and a-half that the "balkanisation" of the Balkans is mainly due. Come down with us from Austria, through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, to Constantinople. The bare, crevassed wall of Karawanken, pink in the sunlight’: above the Alpine lake called Worther See, looks like a barrier between two civilisations. But over the _ snowflecked pass Slovenia is still semi-Alpine country, the peasants much the same (even to Austrian shorts and dirndls_ for some miles), the churches still Roman Catholic if perhaps rather more

bulbous-domed, the road-signs still in a legible alphabet. But as you jolt south among the folds of that offshot of the Alps that runs right through to Greece, you very shortly see-unbelievable sight in Christian Europe-a mosque! And then the typical Bosnians come to wear Turkish turbans or fezzes, pointed shoes, baggy trousers, boleros and bright striped girdles. By the time you reach Montenegro you have seen poverty too: villages that cannot put you up because every stone cottage is already chock-full of family and goats; "farms" that are scarcely larger than the floor space in your house, that are sunk among high boulder walls to keep out wild animals, and that were painfully collected, bucketful of soil by bucketful, from the rainwashings in all the rock crevices for chains around. And then, whether you strike east for the comparative prosperity of Belgrade on the edge of the Hungarian plain, or continue south to where real mountains and real mountaineers begin in Moslem Albania, you run into the Cyrillic alphabet. Over more mougtains lies Macedonia, where kilted Greeks and nomad Viachs, "commuting" yearly from coast to mountains with tents and herds, so mingle among Albanians, Serbs, Turks, and Bulgars that every race in the peninsula claims the area. Our course, however, is for Asiatic Istanbul where we shall meet European dress again-its wearing enforced by law. But meanwhile we traversed the long wide valley of Bulgaria, watching distilleries make Attar of Roses and fragile little water-buffaloes ploughing the fields. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) These regions all spoke Latin® when the ancestors of the present warring nations belonged to Europe only geographically. But the Slavs poured in after the third century A.D. followed by hordes from Central Asia called Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, and Petchenegs. They had hardly all shaken down into Christendom when the Turks-last of the Asiatic invaders-swept like a hailstorm up the peninsula to the Gates of the West at Vienna. Six centuries they stayed farming the peasants, the rayah or toiling cattle of the conquerors. Then, towards the beginning of last century, when the hand of the parasite ruler was trembling with inevitable demoralisation, fugitive chieftains appeared to reclaim their people, raiding out from the impenetrable fastnesses to which the boldest and bitterest had all through the centuries escaped — mountain-sheltered nooks in the Greek gulfs, the Black Mountain of Montenegro, the oak forests of Serbia, the further slopes of the Balkan Range (core of Bulgaria), and the Principalities across the Danube still proud of their origin as Roman colonies (hence Romania) that had Russia to their back. It is because the peninsula’s centres of redemption were so many that the Balkan map has shifted colours like a chameleon; that its states have changed shape dnd size like amoebae; and that their strife has been backed like that of fighting cocks by calculating "Powers." For there are bigger differences inside some of the present nations than exist between them. Half of Yugoslavia, for example, is Roman Catholic; half Orthodox. Half writes Latin alphabet; half Cyrillic. One strip (Slovenia) is thoroughly Western: one strip half barbaric,

and so on, Blame history for the political mis-shape of the Balkans. Racially, culturally, and linguistically (with the single exception of the Greeks) its people are all Slavs together and little Brothers of the Russians. Time to Forget Balkan "Nations"

In fact, to think about Balkan "nations" is simply to perpetuate Balkan misery. Europe as a cultural unit is smaller than we normally think. Of the great area east of Germany and Italy only Finland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the "German" section of Poland have taken part in the western historical development that has created national states, national languages, national laws and

law-courts, national monarchies and churches, national cultures and literatures, national armies and education systems, an urban middle class and capitalist industry. Elsewhere from Estonia to Istanbul there has been only the one "Green Proletariat," speaking local Slav dialects (now called languages), ruling its local life by village elders, fanatically attached to its little farms, and not caring greatly whether The Castle ‘spoke Swedish, Russian, German, Magyar, or Turkish. Our attempt to ring-fence little areas of these peasants into constitutional, capitalist nation-states has created chaos. Politically it is being suggested (by Sumner Welles for the whole area, by Tito for Yugoslavia, by Stalin along the Baltic shore) that we cultivate the existing roots instead: i.e., go back to village and regional self-government inside two, or at most three, confederations of the present states. The boundaries of such Federations would be fixed by economics, not politics-which in itself would raise Balkan and East European standards considerably. More, however, would be needed. The entire Slav world rejects our capitalist notion. of intangible property — whether it be investments, labour, or merely more land than a man’s own family can market-garden. In Russia the peasant now works on his own plot for fun and pocket-money and on the Collective farm for subsistence. Possibly the reverse may suit the Balkans, i.e., individual farming, made payable by slack-period work in village co-opera-tives. If only Henry Wallace’s muchderided vision of "a T.V.A. for the Danube" were made reality (the potential power for it is hurtling through the Iron Gates), then "Soviets plus Electricity" (to quote Lenin .this time: "Soviets" meaning village self-govern-ment and co-operative industries) might read Salvation for East Europe. This is speculation. The fact is that the Russians are in the Balkans.